WPaxos: Ruling the Archipelago with Fast Consensus

WPaxos is a multileader Paxos protocol that provides low-latency and high-throughput consensus across wide-area network (WAN) deployments. Unlike statically partitioned multiple Paxos deployments, WPaxos perpetually adapts to the changing access locality through object stealing. Multiple concurrent leaders coinciding in different zones steal ownership of objects from each other using phase-1 of Paxos, and then use phase-2 to commit update-requests on these objects locally until they are stolen by other leaders. To achieve fast phase-2 commits, WPaxos adopts the flexible quorums idea in a novel manner, and appoints phase-2 acceptors to be close to their respective leaders. We implemented WPaxos and evaluated it on WAN deployments across 5 AWS regions. The dynamic partitioning of the object-space and emphasis on zone-local commits allow WPaxos to significantly outperform both partitioned Paxos deployments and leaderless Paxos approaches, while providing the same consistency guarantees.